A Cowboy's Tears Read online

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  Contents:

  Prologue

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

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  Prologue

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  Mace Nichols was on his own.

  He stood in the doorway of the tiny two-room log cabin, where he'd just dumped his gear, and stared out across the valley toward the Crazies.

  He was alone.

  The cabin echoed with emptiness. No one had lived there since Jed McCall and his nephew had moved out the year before.

  Originally it had been a settler's cabin, then a line shack, then the place Mace and Jed and Taggart Jones had come to as teenagers whenever they'd wanted to get away from nosy adults. Here they had drunk beer, looked at pictures of naked women and indulged their youthful dreams.

  In fact, Mace had indulged in a little more than dreaming the first few times he'd brought Jenny up here. But he had never told anyone about that.

  Later, after they were married, well, it was no secret what they were doing!

  Same thing Taggart had done when he'd brought his new bride, Julie, to live in the cabin eleven years ago. Unlike Jenny, though, Julie had hated the cabin. She'd thrown a fit and insisted they get an apartment in Bozeman. Taggart had, but even so, the marriage hadn't lasted a year.

  After Taggart and Julie's brief stay, the cabin had gone back to line shack status until five years ago when Jed had taken it over.

  And now it was Mace's turn again.

  Only this time he was alone.

  Because—for the first time in fourteen years—there was no Jenny. No Jenny.

  He shook his head and rearranged the thought. No Jenny was the negative way of looking at it.

  He tried to focus on the positive: he was on his own. He was his own man, answerable to no one. No one at all.

  He'd never been on his own before. Ever.

  He'd fallen in love with Jenny Fitzpatrick at the age of seventeen. He'd married her not quite two years later. They'd spent over fourteen years as two halves of a whole.

  No longer.

  He was on his own. The thought opened up the horizons. Gave him new scope. He tried to imagine it—all the places he could go, people he could see, adventures he could pursue.

  He wanted Jenny.

  "Grow up, for God's sake," he told himself sharply.

  The words echoed around the cabin like bullets in a hat-box. "You don't always get what you want."

  A hard adage when it came to you so late in life. In his thirty-three years, Mace had pretty much become accustomed to problems being somebody else's. His own life had always been charmed.

  How could he not feel that way?

  He'd been so loved and had come so far. A humble ranch hand's son, he'd scrimped and saved and worked and slaved until he'd managed to become a rancher himself. A small-scale rancher, true enough—one of those men who lived daily on the edge of potential disaster from beef prices or governmental meddling or city-slicker politics or the freak Montana blizzard—but a rancher nonetheless.

  And blessed, because it was the only thing he'd ever wanted to do. The land was in his blood.

  And he'd been blessed, too, for having Jenny.

  Sweet, funny Jenny. Jenny, who'd tickled and teased him, laughed and squeezed him since they were seventeen years old. She'd had her eye on him since they were eight, she'd told him once. He hadn't noticed her until their senior year in high school.

  "What a late bloomer," Jenny had scoffed.

  Well, yes, he'd admitted. But when he fell, he fell like a ton of bricks.

  His father had said he wasn't good for anything but digging postholes when he was thinking about Jenny.

  "Reckon I'll just keep you on the ground," his old man had said, shaking his head in disgust. "Leastways there you won't fall off."

  Mace hadn't cared. He'd brushed off all comments about his love of Jenny. He ignored Taggart's speculative remarks and Jed's silently raised eyebrows.

  Now there was a pair of late bloomers, he'd thought at the time.

  But he didn't spend much time thinking about them. He had other things on his mind—one thing—Jenny.

  They got married right out of high school, when she was just barely eighteen and he was not quite nineteen.

  "You're lucky you didn't have to marry her sooner," Taggart muttered.

  Taggart had eyes in his head. Jed had thought so, too.

  Even if they didn't talk about what Mace and Jenny did when they went up to the cabin, they knew.

  And Mace knew they were right. That was one of the reasons he considered himself blessed.

  He'd loved Jenny too young and too fully—and yet they escaped the consequences of that love. There had been no weeping mother or shotgun-waving father forcing them to the altar. Thank heavens.

  Not that Mace had anything against kids. But he'd been barely more than a kid himself. So he'd been just as glad he wasn't going to be a father right away.

  When they were older, he'd told Jenny, there would be plenty of time for that.

  Besides, he was too much in love with her to want to share their universe with anyone else just yet.

  Even if he had wanted to, they couldn't have afforded it. Working flat out, cowboying on Taggart's dad's spread, Mace barely made enough for them to live on.

  "I can work, too," Jenny said.

  "Doing what?" Mace scoffed. "Slinging hash? Waiting tables?"

  He knew Jenny wasn't that kind of girl.

  Hell, she'd wanted to be a schoolteacher all her life. She was always the brainy one at school, the one who got straight As and barely cracked a book. She'd made being valedictorian of their class look easy.

  All the teachers thought it was a damn shame she gave up going to college to marry a dead-end cowboy like Mace Nichols. Oh, they hadn't said so. But he knew it.

  Mace might not have been the student she was, but he could read the dismayed looks they gave her as well as anyone. They wondered what she saw in him.

  Sometimes Mace wondered himself. But he didn't question his blessings very long. He just thanked God for Jenny and vowed to be the man she needed, no matter what anyone else thought.

  In fact, all those pitying looks Jenny got made him furious. They made him want to show everybody that marrying him wasn't a dead end, that he could provide for Jenny just fine.

  "I don't want you working," he told her flatly when she suggested it.

  So she hadn't. But being home all day, while he was out cowboying for Will Jones, had given Jenny lots of time to think about what she was missing.

  A baby.

  A baby?

  "God, you got babies on the brain," Mace complained whenever she brought it up. "I told you, we can't afford one."

  "We could if I worked," Jenny said reasonably.

  "But then you wouldn't have time for it."

  Jenny smiled ruefully. "Catch-22."

  "I guess." Mace figured that was out of one of the books she was always reading, but he didn't know for sure. He didn't have time to read.

  What little time he had, he wanted to spend doing more interesting things—like taking his wife into his arms and nuzzling her neck. Like kissing her senseless. Like giving her something else to think about besides having kids.

  "There's lots of time left for babies, Jenn," he assured her between kisses. "We're only twenty. We got years and years."

  "I know that," she answered with a sigh. And then she smiled against his mouth, then succumbed to the touch of his lips, kissing him back.

  The kissing led to touching. The touching led to the bedroom. The babies were forgotten.

  And Mace got what he wanted. Again.

  The following year, though, the issue came up again when
Taggart married Julie, and within a month there was a baby on the way.

  Mace saw the yearning in Jenny's eyes when she found out Julie was pregnant, but he pretended not to notice. He was only dragged into discussing it when she brought it up.

  "Of course, I'd like a baby, too," he said when she mentioned it. "But first I'd like to get us some land."

  They'd been lying in bed in this very cabin, Will Jones's version of "married cowboy's housing," when they'd talked.

  The cabin was small, it was leaky, but for the time being at least, it was theirs. Still, Mace knew, as he lay staring up at the tin roof, listening to the rain come down—and in—that he wanted better than this.

  "Land?" Jenny mused. She was on her stomach beside him, naked and soft, and if he hadn't just finished making love with her, he knew he'd be making love to her again.

  He nodded. "Yep. Land. You don't get anywhere workin' for somebody else."

  His dad had always told him that, and his dad's example more than his dad's words had shown the truth of the matter. The Nicholses had never, as far as Mace knew, owned the land they'd worked on. They'd always come too late, left too early. And when times got tight, they were the first let go. It wasn't going to happen to him. To them. Not if he could help it.

  "Will would sell me some up above Flathead, I reckon. Or maybe ol' man Galbraith will sell out."

  "A ranch, you mean?"

  He nodded. "It'd take a heck of a lot of work to get the down payment, but we could do it. Will would let me run cattle with him in the meantime. I know it."

  "You're serious?"

  He pushed himself up on his elbows to meet her gaze.

  "You bet. But," he felt compelled to be honest, "it's a long haul, Jenny. It'd mean … puttin' things off."

  "Babies, you mean?" She was looking right at him, her hazel eyes unflinching.

  He ran his tongue over his lips. "I know Taggart and Julie are having a kid. I know I said we'd start thinkin' about a family. And I am thinkin', believe me. But what I'm thinkin' is that Taggart's got the ranch coming to him someday. And I'm thinkin' I got nothing. I want better for our kids than that. I want better than my dad was able to do for us. He tried, but hell, we up and moved so many times before we came here an' Mr. Jamison took him on…"

  The first eight years of Mace's life had been spent moving from one ranch to another where his dad had worked his tail off and then got let go because the rancher decided to cut back.

  Only Otis Jamison, because his spread covered half the valley, could afford to take on a good man and keep him through the hard times as well as good.

  But even then, there'd been no getting ahead.

  Mace's mother had worked just as hard as her husband, trying to make ends meet. It was hard work as much as pneumonia that killed her when Mace was fifteen.

  He wanted better for Jenny.

  "What do you say?" he'd said to her then, nuzzling her ear, nibbling her jawline, beginning to want inside her once more.

  Her hazel eyes smiled at him. Then she wrapped her arms around him and giggled. "I say 'Just keep thinking, Mace.' You're so good at it."

  "You think so, huh?" he said, rolling her in his arms until he slid on top of her, then into her. "I'm also good at this."

  And then he'd loved her.

  He'd moved slowly, leisurely, fitting his body to hers, savoring the miracle of how well they fit together, how attuned they were to each other's rhythms. They'd come a long way since their first fumbling attempts at lovemaking. In those days it had all been hot, fevered gropings and eager desperate efforts that had, as often as not, left them breathless and frustrated. Certainly they'd left Jenny frustrated.

  He wasn't much good at holding back in those days, hadn't really figured out yet the real meaning of "ladies first."

  But Jenny had never complained.

  She'd wrapped her arms around him and moved with him, meeting his urgency with her own. And over time he'd got better at their loving. He'd been less frantic, more leisurely. He'd spent more time stroking and touching and kissing, enjoying that, letting the anticipation grow.

  "Along with other things," Jenny had said, giggling, when he'd told her that one night. She'd reached a hand down between them and touched him where another part of his anticipation was "growing."

  Mace had trembled under her touch. His breath had hissed out between his teeth, and his whole body tensed.

  "You're playing with fire," he'd warned her.

  Anticipation was fine as long as he could control it, but when Jenny took over—watch out!

  "Fire, hmm?" She'd smiled and brushed a kiss across his lips. She moved above him then, bolder than she had been when they'd first begun making love together. Her hand moved more insistently. "What is it they say about starting fires with friction?"

  "Jenn!"

  But she didn't let him go. She feathered kisses along his jaw, then dropped them on his breastbone. She touched his nipples with her tongue. She made him squirm.

  Jenny could always make him squirm—and make him love every minute of it. And he always took great pleasure in returning the favor.

  He had taken pleasure.

  Had. Past tense.

  Mace's fists clenched tightly at his sides. He swallowed against the ache in his throat and closed his stinging eyes to shut out the sight of the cabin to which he'd brought her fourteen years ago, the cabin in which he'd loved her the first night of their married life. Just hours before he'd vowed to love her for a lifetime.

  He still did.

  He loved Jenny—but he would never be able to show her how much. Not in that way again.

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  Chapter 1

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  Jenny opened the door carefully, as if she were expecting at any moment for a bomb to go off in her face.

  She could almost hear it ticking in the silence of the ranch house kitchen. No, it was only the clock above the stove, and she was being fanciful.

  She didn't feel fanciful. She felt worried.

  She looked around for signs of Mace.

  His boots weren't by the back door. His hat wasn't on the hook. She hadn't seen his truck, but she'd assumed he'd parked it behind the barn. Maybe he wasn't back yet. She glanced at the clock. Only five-thirty.

  Yes, it was possible that he wasn't home yet.

  If he'd had to go above the creek to move cattle, he might be late. Jenny rarely knew exactly when to expect him. It was just that somehow—today—she'd expected him to be here.

  So they could talk.

  They needed to talk.

  Yesterday, when they'd got the news, neither of them had said much. It was too new, too hard. She, at least, hadn't known what to say.

  Mace, normally far more taciturn than she, had been the one to blurt out, "I don't believe it," when the doctor had given them the test results.

  His normally darkly tanned face had drained of color, and he shook his head angrily. "That's bull," he'd said.

  The doctor had smiled sympathetically, but his sympathy didn't change his words.

  "I'm afraid it is," he'd said gently. "On this test, at least, the results are pretty conclusive. You aren't producing any live sperm."

  Jenny had seen her husband floored in a fight. She'd seen him kicked by a horse. She'd seen him gored by a bull.

  But she'd never seen Mace as white as death.

  He sat in the chair next to her, absolutely rigid. He opened his mouth, then closed it again. His lips pressed together in a tight line—so tight a muscle in his jaw ticked.

  So tight she thought he'd shatter. His whole body seemed to clench.

  She wanted to reach out to him, to touch him. But she knew as sure as she knew Mace that if she did, he would crack right there.

  The air in the room seemed to sizzle with electricity, to grow hot and close, as if a storm were brewing right there in the office. For what seemed an eternity no one moved.

  Not Mace. Not Jenny. Not even the doctor.

  H
e sat quietly and let his words sink in. He looked at them with quiet commiseration, but he didn't qualify anything. He didn't offer any hope. He wasn't going to deny what he'd just so baldly said.

  Finally when the silence went on and on, he said, "I wish I could give you better news."

  "Maybe they just died! Right then!"

  At Mace's outburst, the doctor looked startled. He raised his gaze to watch as Mace seemed almost to erupt from the chair.

  He paced the length of the small office, then spun and stalked back. "I mean, maybe those sperm were dead!" he said. "That once. That one time we—you…!" He couldn't say the words. She knew how much he'd hated the experience. "Who could blame 'em?" he said bitterly. "Prob'ly scared 'em to death."

  He didn't look at Jenny as he spoke. He didn't have to; she knew what he meant.

  They'd argued about his going to the doctor at all.

  Jenny had been there more times than she wanted to count. She'd been trying to get pregnant for over three years. At first it had been no big deal.

  Sometimes when you stopped trying to prevent pregnancies, you didn't get pregnant right away. Jenny knew that. She was philosophical.

  Then she thought maybe she was nervous, maybe she was trying too hard. Maybe that was the problem.

  But after two years had gone by with no results at all, she'd begun to think maybe it was more than that.

  She started reading everything she could about conception. She talked to her doctor, she took her temperature. She took thyroid pills. Eventually she'd had tests. And more tests.

  Everything seemed fine. She asked the doctor about fertility drugs. He said he didn't think she needed them.

  "But I'm not conceiving," she argued.

  "Maybe it's your husband. Maybe we should check."

  It wasn't something Jenny had wanted to bring up to Mace. There had been very little in their marriage that she'd been reluctant to talk about. But somehow, asking Mace to do this wasn't easy.

  Maybe because she knew how he'd react.

  "Fertility tests?" He was aghast. "Like I'm some damned bull?"

  "It's just to check, Mace," she said. "To rule out the possibility."